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lofty-cli supports four output formats so you can pipe results into any downstream tool. The default is human-readable text; everything else is selected with --format (or the --json shortcut).

text (default)

Designed for terminals. Tables are aligned and colorized; long fields are truncated.
Use --no-color to drop ANSI sequences and --no-header to omit the column row — useful when piping to awk or cut:

json

Stable, machine-readable, and the only format that preserves nested fields and full precision for 64-bit IDs.
Lofty IDs are 64-bit integers. Always use --json (not text) when piping IDs to another script — see JavaScript / TypeScript Integration for why precision matters.
Combine with jq for ad-hoc filtering:

csv

Round-trips cleanly into spreadsheets and csvkit / pandas.
Add --no-header to drop the header row when appending to an existing file.

yaml

Useful for human review of nested API responses.

Choosing fields

Most list and get commands accept --return-fields to reduce payload size and speed up downstream parsing:
The server applies the projection — the wire response itself is smaller, not just the rendered output.

Exit codes

Scripts should always check the exit code rather than inspect stderr text.